Be Your Own Harry Smith

"I heard that you have/ A CD compilation/ Of every good sixties cut/ And another/ Box set/ From the seventies..."

Desperately seeking a high-quality rip of The Flying Lizards' cover of "Money (That's What I Want)". All I can find is some shoddy bitrate copy taken from-- yeesh-- the follow-up soundtrack to The Wedding Singer. If someone can hook me up, I'll re-label it as #99 and stick it between "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Cars" in the desktop folder labeled "THIS IS UNCOOL (incomplete)". Eventually, the folder will swell to 2.5GB, taking up a little more than 10% of my non-iPod and representing approximately 25 CDs in old-world terms.

Speaking of the old world, in 1952, musicologist Harry Smith had to painstakingly transfer his prized collection of blues and folk 78s to master tape in order to compile his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music. Ha, sucker. Okay, so he probably shouldn't be openly mocked, given that he preserved a treasure trove of American cultural history. But had he merely been born 60 years later, his knack for putting together a comprehensive overview of a musical era might have been considerably less difficult, simply a matter of a couple of evenings spent in front of the computer and a handful of freeware.

Of course, the goals of the American Anthology and the goals of the modern compiler are almost entirely opposite. Where Smith was looking to distribute exceptionally rare performances to a larger audience, today's compilation challenge is to throw some helpful boundaries around the seemingly limitless expanse of readily available music. Pick an era, a genre, a country, a letter of the alphabet, and start coloring between the lines-- and don't worry about time constrants. Whereas one used to need some sort of qualifications, an in at a record company, and a lawyer willing to track down the necessary licenses, assembling a comp these days is completely democratized, provided you've got a nice ergonomic office setup.

The homemade compilations currently sailing the file-sharing seas come in a variety of forms, from running mixtapes taken from mp3 blogs like Gabba Amp/Pod or Fluxblog, to collaborative efforts assembled by webboard discussion, to folders stocked not just with music, but also meticulously crafted printer-ready artwork. The one I'm assembling is based on Garry Mulholland's book of his 500 favorite post-"Anarchy in the UK"/"Dancing Queen"-era singles, and I'm sure you can find people who've done similar collating of lists from other publications (even that dreadful Rolling Stone Top 500 Singles one).

The comps I've chosen to profile below don't fit into either of these groups, but are rather examples of music writers who've chosen to paint an exhaustive portrait of a favorite time period. Whereas revising the canon once meant writing persuasively enough to inspire readers to spend hundreds of dollars on your personal recommendations, the distributive power of file-sharing now cuts out the middleman, pleading your case directly through the music you're endorsing. Here's a few worth seeking out on the music-stealer of your choice:

Boom Selection_Issue 01
One of the first mp3 blogs, Boom Selection also created one of (if not the) first pseudo-historical CDR compilation. The unofficial home of 00s mashup culture, Boom Selection attempted, as the liner notes to their collection state, to "come up with some sort of 'definitive' collection of the scene." In this case, that means 432 songs and 11 DJ mixes spread out over three CD-Rs culling the best from the plunderphonics/mashup world and an invitation to the listener to "burn your own audio CD compilation." The set also adds upwards of 75 officially released songs, tracks that serve as frequent ingredients for mashups or simply fit the cut-up/electro-pop aesthetic. This massive collection-- complete with file-sharing's occasionally dubious sound quality and haphazardly labeled file names-- set the standard for would-be musicologists, and the discs were so in demand that in late 2002 the site buckled under the weight of the workload, and shut down for more than a year.

scottpl's 1978-82 Box
Many of these sets, of course, aren't intended to be definitive documents of anything, save maybe the compiler's taste. Three years ago-- long before he became Pitchfork's managing editor-- Scott Plagenhoef provided me with my first glimpse of this concept's potential. Under the guise of his preferred internet shorthand, scottpl, he shared a five-disc collection he'd made for a friend, which chronicled his favorite tracks from 1978-82 as an exhaustive argument to back up his frequent assertion that those five years marked music's most fertile recent period. Over 96 tracks, the set spotlights punk acquiring prefixes at a blistering rate, hip-hop budding off of disco and reggae, and the ascendancy of synthesizers. The genre mish-mash sounds best with the crossfader plugin running it all in hot water, the Buggles bleeding into Visage bleeding into Rocker's Revenge bleeding into Prince bleeding into...

The 1981 Box
If a five-year span is too broad an era for you, there's this almost ridiculously comprehensive document of Reagan's first year in office. Covering one-fifth the years with over twice the music, this curator (whose name has been omitted at his request) doesn't hold himself to Plagenhoef's one-track-per-artist rule, and spends most of the set focused on post-punk. There's not a lot of doubling back, given that the 390 (!) tracks are spread out over 343 (!!) artists, and by staying focused on one particular (if frantically out-branching) scene, his 1981 Box shows a lot more cohesiveness in its grandeur. Throw in the excellent graphic design work-- it's one of the few compilations that has physically materialized, housed in a white box containing a detailed booklet, an introductory essay, and a different piece of art for each of the set's 10 discs-- and the set is a standard-bearer for experts looking to put together future headphone history books.

I Love Music CDR700Go! Collections
A series of other single-year retrospectives have been given birth in recent years by the denizens of the music critic circle-jerk I Love Music, who have generated an entire inventory of single-disc mp3 mixes, with listings accessible in the message board's archives. Assembled by folks like Seattle Weekly editor Michaelangelo Matos, All Music Guide contributor Andy Kellman, and former Pitchfork rabblerouser Chris Ott, most are less motivated by personal taste than a desire to most accurately document the calendar year, above and below ground. Hence, the 1976 disc makes room for both the Buzzcocks and "Disco Duck", and Barry Manilow and Pere Ubu are compilation flatmates for the first-- and probably last-- time. Waiving the right to selective hindsight makes the discs great archeological fodder; on random, they play like great radio stations with extreme microprogramming.

Smile Boxes
Not long after the release of Brian Wilson's Smile last year, file-sharing networks hemmorhaged sprawling Smile compendiums. The more aggressive ones featured several hours' worth of material from the original sessions which had leaked by way of the countless bootlegs that had been released underground since the project was canned in 1967. Several also attempted to recreate Smile as faithfully as possible in various forms from those recordings-- some re-envisioned the album as it might have been, had it been completed in 1967, relying on books, interviews, and other documentation from that period; others pieced together the old source material to reflect, as closely as possible, the official, re-recorded version that had just hit stores. Of course, working with incomplete tracks means these collections consist largely of instrumental and demo versions, but nonetheless make for rewarding listens, offering a level of insight into the album that, until now, had only been imagined by the most devout Beach Boys fans.

dleone's Out Rock Box 1969-79
Full circle to another intra-staff name-drop, but Dominique Leone's set is worth mentioning for being a bit askew from the rest of the pack. While Out Rock is also intended to reflect a particular era of music, it does so via a genre whose distinctions may exist only in Leone's mind, a world where prog-rock bands with hard-to-pronounce names are in cahoots with free jazz, French seducers, krautrock, and modern composers. Like Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z collection, the five discs appear to share more of an outsider ethos rather than a uniform sound, with this roadmap offering a (slightly) easier access point to the often impenetrable world of Dom's taste. The Out Rock box proves the power of mp3 comps to not just clarify and classify a particular genre or era, but to actually build one up from scratch-- more playing the part of Linnaeus than Harry Smith.

Which all serves to highlight a revelation not unlike that of the 70s UK punk scene: Just as you didn't need lessons, a record deal, or publicist to start your own band, lawyers, labels, and massive production costs are no longer pre-requisites for chronicling music history. The lack of licensing issues means more and better listener-made sets are on the way-- and whether they're compiled by snooty know-it-all rock journalists or simply by ardent supporters of particular genres, timespans, or critical theories is of little consequence: It's all how ambitious you're going to be with yours.